Yay, the TSA has officially decided to roll out their millimeter-wave airport checkpoint scanners, which essentially create a “naked” image of the person in the scanning machine. It’s not quite like paging through Playboy, but it’s a fairly high-resolution photo at the skin level.
Homeland Security’s Clark Kent Ervin (his real name!) said:
Fearmongering, whee!
What’s perhaps more frightening is the reaction of some airline passengers who were asked about the screening devices. Eileen Reardon of Baltimore said:
No, Eileen, actually you don’t have to go along with it. You can refuse the screening (resulting in a pat-down, which is marginally less invasive) or you can simply refuse to fly. That aside, the culture of fear that’s been built by our government and the companies profiting from it for the last seven years simply continues to astound me. People who would be appalled by a stranger grabbing their breasts or taking voyeur photos of them seem to have no trouble whatsoever with airport security screeners fondling them and watching them from a remote, enclosed, private room.
From a rousing discussion on Slashdot:
Society has become so caught up in trying to prevent ‘them’ from winning that the exact opposite effect seems to have occurred. Their goal wasn’t to savagely murder thousands of people– that was just the tool they chose to use. No, their real goal was to make themselves known, and us frightened. I hate to say it, but they succeeded.